The idea that “Karel Čapek is not widely known” is inconceivable—to a Czech, that is. Every Czech child grows up with his witty fairy tales and stories about his dog, until they encounter his other writing at school, which includes translations, dramas, novels, short stories, and feuilletons on matters serious or less so. Yet, as Thomas Ort reminds us in his book on this multifaceted personality, despite his international fame in the interwar period, today Karel Čapek (1890–1938) is little-known outside of his homeland and a small circle of researchers in Czech studies. In Art and Life in Modernist Prague: Karel Čapek and His Generation, 1911–1938, Ort sets out to explore Čapek's life, work, and intellectual background as well as the cultural life in Prague of the early twentieth century. Doing so, he adds to the recent interest in this Central European city by British and American historians and cultural historians, such as Derek Sayer, Chad Bryant, and Peter Demetz. The alleged familiarity with Čapek felt by the Czechs and Czech specialists can make them rather unforgiving when someone discusses their national history from an unfavorable viewpoint. The generally negative reception of the revision of Czechoslovak interwar history by Andrea Orzoff and Mary Heimann are prominent examples. Ort, however, approaches the subject in a rather sensitive and careful way and avoids a controversial reassessment of the period and of Čapek.
Taking the reader through the first three decades of the century, Ort explores the intellectual and artistic milieu in prewar Prague, the grave impact of the Great War on the writer and his peers, the major foreign philosophical influences on Čapek, his clashes with the younger generation of the avant-garde, and finally, analyzes several of Čapek's works from the 1920s and 1930s. The individual chapters are self-sufficient and deal with separate and often disparate themes to the point that the book gives the impression of being a collection of articles. Yet the overall picture that Ort gives is one of the vibrant and intellectually rich world of Čapek and his contemporaries in a city that underwent a significant cultural transformation.
We are presented with a well-informed, yet rather conventional view of both Karel Čapek and the milieu in which he worked. Ort adopts the often repeated image of modernist, masculine Prague where (mostly Czech) progressive and avant-garde artists and intellectuals dominate. We do not learn much about the wider context that had an impact on the Prague intellectuals—for instance, the strong and persistent nationalism in politics and the arts or the academic and historicist tendencies that survived into the interwar period. And although the focus is, understandably, on Prague as a recognizable cultural, geographical, and political center, venturing beyond the capital would have added to the intellectual landscape that is portrayed here. There was indeed a rich cultural and artistic life in the provinces, too—Čapek, for instance, was closely involved in the daily Lidové noviny, based in the Moravian city of Brno, while many other smaller towns played the role of regional centers for modern art and life.
Ort also focuses on the contemporary visual arts and their modernist tendencies. He pays a lot of attention to Cubism—related to Čapek through a number of associates—and the reasons it was so successful in Prague and not in the other large cities of the Habsburg monarchy, Vienna or Budapest. He shows us that the unique architectural language that developed at the time had much in common with Cubist painting. Yet, the phenomenon, as many architectural historians (Alena Janatková, Ákos Moravánsky, Jindřich Vybíral, Vendula Hnídková, Rostislav Švácha) have explained recently, was more a search for an original expression rather than a reception of French art, with roots in baroque and Gothic forms, local folk traditions, or German expressionism, among others. Moreover, such architecture also appeared outside of Prague and transformed a couple of provincial towns.
Exploring the interwar artistic setting, Ort focuses on another key figure of the interwar Czech avant-garde, Karel Teige, whom he portrays as Čapek's nemesis and representative of an alternative, radical modernism. He is critical of Teige's artistic group Devětsil and its flirtation with almost any –ism available at the time, but again, as with the case of Cubism, we need to be reminded that experimentation with different forms of expression reflected the influx and exchange of ideas with artists abroad as well as the turbulent nature of political, cultural, and social change. Only a few of the many art groups or journals founded during this period lasted more than a couple of years. Teige and Čapek are positioned against each other in a dynamic relationship, but where the two personalities meet is in their mutual interest in the art of the everyday, the popular, primitive, or people's art. Both men, as well as Čapek's brother Josef, and the poet S. K. Neumann, who is mentioned several times in the book, were fascinated by the possibility of the art of the common people in cities and the countryside to renew modern art. Further exploration of the sympathies with the proletariat and attention to class differences in this period would make for an interesting read.
The book is strongest in its detailed literary and linguistic analysis of several of Čapek's works and in the exploration of his philosophical inspirations in Henri-Louis Bergson, Georg Simmel, and a few others. Yet here, the same pattern surfaces—we encounter a writer from a small country being directly or indirectly influenced by Western philosophy. The absence of more local influences, especially T. G. Masaryk, becomes prominent. He and Čapek were close in their political as well as philosophical views, and even though Ort mentions the Friday discussion groups that Čapek organized and Masaryk sometimes attended, Masaryk's influence on Čapek is only briefly addressed.
In the same way, even though the book is not trying to be a political history, it touches on serious issues that Čapek and his generation encountered. The First World War and its impact on the Prague intellectuals are explored well, while other crucial political events that inevitably affected the artists are only sketched. Ort does not delve much into discussions of the formation of Czechoslovakia, racial conflicts in Czechoslovakia, or the rise of Slovak and Czech nationalism in the early 1930s. The last chapter on the Czechoslovak Condition would be the place to deal with many of these topics in relation to Čapek's dramatic and prosaic work.
There is no doubt the book is well-researched and sheds light on many aspects of cultural life in modern Prague. However, it does not fully go beyond the traditional approach to Czech culture as a derivate of foreign, meaning Western, precedents. Karel Čapek should be of interest for many reasons, foremost for his curiosity about varied subjects, which was transmitted in his writing on topics from gardening to current affairs. Although this has given him many critics, including Robert Pynsent and the writer and publisher Josef Škvorecký, who claimed that Čapek spread himself too thinly, this broad approach and wide range of interests is something that the modernist era did well. Čapek was a novelist who could write in an approachable way about politics, dogs, the arts, foreign countries, children's stories, criminal cases, and philosophy. And even though Ort chooses not to explore all these aspects of Čapek's oeuvre, his analysis manages to capture how rich and intertwined the worlds of literature, philosophy, architecture, and the visual arts were in Prague in the first few decades of the twentieth century.
